There is another gun forum I look at from time to time but am not yet a member. They have a section that shows members, guests and robots. Out of 300 people on the forum just now, 20 were robots. What the heck is that? I know well robo-calls on my phone trying to sell stuff but don't know robot forum member.

They're automated web scraping software algorithms, such as Google's routine web crawling bots which scan for results to enhance user searches, or the Internet Archive's scheduled snapshots of the entire web. Governments and corporations host such software for various reasons, mostly innocent, sometimes not. Police agencies sometimes use them to search social media and forums for nefarious activities or known suspects.

a_canadian wrote: Police agencies sometimes use them to search social media and forums for nefarious activities or known suspects.

That's mostly what I think it is.

NSA documenting everyone and everything.

Some of the reddit subforums have robots to respond to new posts with rules and ultimatums that have to be met of the post will be deleted or they will be banned or blah blah

Must have happened to me. I did a post once about a hypothetical nefarious act in a "what if" context and it disappeared.

hardcase wrote:Must have happened to me. I did a post once about a hypothetical nefarious act in a "what if" context and it disappeared.

I own 4 different online forum systems devoted to other subjects besides gun and the bots are simply search engine crawlers who index your website and some of the posts on the website for placement in search engines.

Forum owners can switch different access levels to the bots in their forum administration area or completely deny access to certain bots. The bots automatically crawl the web 24/7/365.

None of us actually have access to what ever the bots are gathering about our websites.